Obtain a Certificate

To enroll for a certificate, a certificate request must be made by the user, computer, or service that has access to the private key associated with the public key that will be part of the certificate. Users, computers, and services can autoenroll for certificates without user intervention, depending upon the public key policies established by your system administrator.

Users can also obtain certificates by:

Initiating autoenrollment from the Certificates snap-in.

Requesting certificates by using the Certificate Request Wizard.

Requesting a certificate over the Web.

In addition, administrators can request smart card user certificates and smart card certificates for logging on to the system on behalf of other users by using their enrollment agent certificate.

The following topics contain procedures to use for obtaining certificates: